Learning Privacy Habits of PDS Owners

The concept of Personal Data Storage (PDS) has recently emerged as an alternative and innovative way of managing personal data w.r.t. the service-centric one commonly used today. The PDS offers a unique logical repository, allowing individuals to collect, store, and give access to their data to third parties. The research on PDS has so far mainly focused on the enforcement mechanisms, that is, on how user privacy preferences can be enforced. In contrast, the fundamental issue of preference specification has been so far not deeply investigated. In this paper, we do a step in this direction by proposing different learning algorithms that allow a fine-grained learning of the privacy aptitudes of PDS owners. The learned models are then used to answer third party access requests. The extensive experiments we have performed show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.